


Ghosts In The Mainframe

by Time_Is_Restored



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Anyone Can Fight Like A God But Jade Harley Can Fight Like A Bloodhound, Dirk Strider Isn't Evil He's Just An Asshole Trying To Save The World, God Tier Powers Are Terrifying, Prince of Heart VS Witch of Space: FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, The Homestuck Epilogues, The Homestuck Epilogues: Candy, The Homestuck Epilogues: Meat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21895081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Time_Is_Restored/pseuds/Time_Is_Restored
Summary: Jade Harley takes it upon herself to hunt down Dirk Strider and, as the kids say, 'fucking murder his ass.' This is an exceptionally difficult task, but she is an exceptionally difficult girl.
Relationships: Jade Harley & Dirk Strider
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	Ghosts In The Mainframe

**Author's Note:**

> I think these two characters out of just about the whole cast have some of the most stunningly opposed personal philosophy, despite having been raised in wildly similar environments. This was the result of a crazed brainstorm about what it would look like if Jade actually took it upon herself to fight dirty, 'winner takes all' style, keeping in mind that Dirk so far has done literally everything in his power to avoid such a fight. 

“It’s you again, huh?”

Jade pauses midstride. Gently, she feels for the ground beneath her with the tip of her shoe. She wiggles around for a little bit, feeling through the layers of Paradox Space, and with a single breath, wills them to collapse together – lightyears of damage and irrelevance buckle under the weight of her gravity, and when she lands, she finds herself somewhere utterly indeterminate. 

She blinks slowly, and the white noise drifting aimlessly all around her, clogging her vision with detritus and eyesores slowly begins to fade. 

The knob of the viewfinder turns, turns, and clicks to a halt. She comes into focus. 

It’s a man. Box coils framing his head like a sunset framing a mountain range. He’s wearing socks with his sandals. His god-tier robes are tired, dirty, and worn. His face, even more so. He-

“You know who I am, Jade. We lived on the same planet for five years. Petty jabs through the narrative _really_ aren't your style.” 

Her fingers twitch, itching for a trigger that is suddenly nowhere in sight. Why would she have brought a gun here? In-between the pages of the limelight, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to kill, nothing to defeat. Bringing a gun to this type of standoff is-

“Exactly what I would do and you know it.” 

A sound similar to glass breaking on impact. The gun is in her hands. The gun is levelled at Strider’s chest.

“So impersonal Harely! Et tu?” 

“Are you talking like a Shakespearian villain just to piss me off, or are you actually, literally incapable of operating off script.” 

“Must we ruin the illusion?” 

She narrows her eyes. Sniffs the air. 

“You’re not even here right now,” she growls.

“No,” Dirk concedes, scratching idly at a surprisingly fresh scar. As she speaks, the stream of information pouring into Jade’s mind stops and starts erratically – a broken record being manually reconstructed, frame by frame. This isn’t DIRK, in the same sense that she isn’t JADE.

But it is a feedback loop comprised of the equal and opposite reactions to her Dirk’s meddling in the mainframe. And for all intents and purposes, that makes them exchangeable.

“Ouch.” Dirk winces, but his face doesn’t move. None of him ever moves, not really. It’s more like an image, burnt into a TV screen, occasionally flaring up when put against the correct contrast. The closer it is to what Dirk has done in the past – a mirror, but never a copy – the clearer the image. 

“Why do this?” She asks, hallow and exhausted. Electricity shoots up her spine, and runs down to the tips of her fingers. Her hair forgets gravity for a moment, then shoots back together in clumps and knots like poorly dried glue. 

Dirk watches her, his face blank. “Space players weren’t built for this, Jade. You shouldn’t be here. There’s a reason I had to keep you out of the-“

“Tell me again what I should and shouldn’t be doing.” She snarls, and this time Dirk glares, utterly unimpressed. 

“I get that you and your friends were real fucking hurt by me saving the very concept of existence from losing all of its sanctity, but you’re making an ass out of yourself Harley.” 

“God,” Jade scoffs, inhaling radiation and exhaling black smoke. “You really think you can out-gravity a space-time constant, don’t you.” 

Dirk rolls his eyes, shifts his weight onto his back foot. “Gravity would mean nothing if you ever actually succeeded at stopping me, and you know it. I’m fighting a battle the rest of you could never even dream to understand, and I know that because I know _literally everything.”_

Jade clenches her right fist, and punches outward, towards Dirk. 

The impact is immediate. The walls around him crumple like tin foil; the air ripples, and then disappears. Just one more thing that burnt up before it could ever enter Jade’s atmosphere. 

Unseen by either of them, the effect continues on for miles, arcing through Paradox Space like a knife taken to the fabric of the universe. 

She bares her teeth. “I don’t need to play First Guardian to kill you fair and square.” 

Dirk’s shadow takes a step to the side, examines the carnage to its host. Bones jut out, cartilage shatters on impact, and animalistic claw marks mar every inch of skin not covered by fabric. 

Dirk fades away like ashes in the wind, and Dirk takes his place. Dirk was never born, and Dirk was always here. Dirk never left, and Dirk is forever non-existent. 

“Okay,” the voice echoes. “I’m thinking we need to get you some therapy, cuz.”

Footprints in sand, washed away by high tide. The water erases proof of the footprint; the sand remembers what time forgets. 

“Why do you want so badly to fight in a battle you don’t even believe in?” Dirk asks, his jaw jutting through his own mouth, limbs jerking like a clockwork toy. “You can’t win without first agreeing to accept the premise on which the declaration of war was forged upon.” 

“Talk all you want,” Jade hisses. “But your war doesn’t exist. There is no battle. There was no declaration. There is no premise. There’s just one sick, lonely boy, clinging to delusions at the end of his relevance.”

Dirk laughs at that. Doubles over, wheezing, gasping, and for a good few feet in any direction all Jade can see is echoes upon echoes, all laughing, all crying, and none of them listening. 

“Oh God,” they speak, a cacophony of idiosyncrasy. “You think I’m doing this for me?” 

The figures lose their definition. The lines break down. The panels cease to exist. It’s a cloud of pink, black, and orange, filling up the room, filling up Jade’s lungs, bleeding through the ink onto the paper and _staining_ it.

“All I want,” They cry, broken and unbreakable all at once, “is for no one to feel like this again.” 

And for a second, they see each other. Really, truly, they understand each other. The difference between a girl who fears nothing more than to be told that she did have a purpose after all, it’s just that she simply wasn’t good enough to be utilised, and a boy who wants with all of his heart to white this horrible story out from the history books, and into a Creation Myth, just so something, anything could have a point, ever, ever again.

They’re a breath apart, in the end. 

The choked gasp between ‘please’ and ‘stop.’

Jade closes her eyes. Heart is much more subtle than Space, especially when it comes to mingling with the multiverse. 

Heart is a coy suggestion, whispered delicately in your ear and rooting in your soul, until you blink and you don’t recognise what you see in the mirror. 

Space is screaming, howling, sinking your teeth into the future that you want to live to see, then digging your heels in and shouting _NO. NO, YOU WON’T LEAVE ME. YOU DON’T GET TO CHOOSE WHERE THIS GOES. YOU OBEY **ME.**_

She stomps her foot. When she opens her eyes, its only her and Dirk. Singular. 

She glues the book shut. She presses the heel of her boot into the narrative’s neck. 

Space flattens out. Dirk is cut off from his echoes, and he knows it. 

“No more god awful PARALLELS.” She growls. “This you, and this me, and nothing else.” 

“’This me’,” it repeats, sickeningly sweet, blinking slowly, its eyes comically wide. “’This me’ is a fucking sham, Your Honour. Who are you even arguing with right now? The ghosts in your TV static?” 

“Unfortunately for you, Strider,” she spits, “you don’t get to choose who I argue with. Just like you don’t get to choose the fate of this shitty fucking universe, or anyone in it, or anyone out of it!” 

This seems to genuinely shock Dirk for... well, honestly, it’s the first time Jade’s seen anything slip through his immaculately infuriating façade, let alone _confusion._

“You hold us up to the light and we fucking die,” Jade snarls, pure heat radiating off of her like a Star. “You take away the light source, we cease to exist.” 

“Honestly,” she sighs, and for a second, everything goes silent. Everything – the Genesis Frog, string theory, the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions, even her own heartbeat – it all stops. 

“Would it _kill_ you stupid fucking Strilondes to not look a gift horse in the mouth?” 

The Dirk blinks.

And he’s not there anymore. And he never was. And he never will be.

The tension drains out of Jade’s body like wringing dirty dishwater from a sponge. Slowly, the background begins to fade back into view. Where were they again? Looks like a forgotten hallway somewhere, already half overgrown by weeds. 

“Ghosts in the mainframe,” she mutters to herself, as her eyes fog over and the planes shift against each other. The multiverse is infinite in its multiplicity, but _crushingly_ finite in the space it occupies. There’s nowhere for a Dirk to hide, not anymore. 

“Well,” she mutters, shattering into incomprehensibly tiny imprints of herself, sliding through the layers of the universe – letting herself in through the mail slot, so to speak. “He’s not the least efficient bug report I’ve ever seen. But certainly the most annoying.” 

Somewhere, nestled deeply in the safety of his very own self-inflicted void, Dirk Strider gets a toothache.

**Author's Note:**

> As Candy Aradia once said: 
> 
> ARADIA: the people on this planet seem so...  
> 
> 
> ARADIA: well i dont want to be mean
> 
> ARADIA: but is that the paradox of living in a utopia
> 
> ARADIA: when everything is perfect and your every need is met
> 
> ARADIA: is it natural for people to start crossing blades at imaginary enemies 
> 
> tfw ur own neuroses are out for blood and there's literally nothing around you that can bleed in the way that you need them to other than your fellow gods 


End file.
